Biden To Meet Tech Giant’s Executives To Pursue Top Cyber Security Agenda

The situation in IT security is felt to be getting worse and worse. The counter-offensive is now to start from the USA. US President Joe Biden swore the country’s big technology companies to accept it and wrested specific commitments from them.

The ransomware scene, in particular, has made headlines over and over again in recent months and even paralyzed important infrastructure companies such as pipeline operators with its blackmail campaigns. But the theft of millions of user data and the placement of spy backdoors on a large scale is no longer an exceptional phenomenon.

Biden had therefore now summoned representatives of the large IT companies in the USA to the White House to finally set a new course in this development. “The federal government cannot tackle this challenge alone,” he said, according to a report by the Reuters news. And during the meeting, there were actually promises that got pretty specific.

Concrete actions

Under the leadership of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the companies will now develop new guides for business and society in order to make progress in IT security. This applies, for example, to the elaboration of guidelines according to which safer technologies can be developed. And there was also broad agreement that the use of open-source software should be promoted, as this at least makes it easier to identify problems.

But there are also commitments from the individual companies as to what concrete contributions they want to make to improve the situation:

• Microsoft plans to invest $ 20 billion in improving the US security infrastructure over the next five years.
• Google pledged 10 billion dollars for the same period and also wants to train 100,000 specialists in IT security.
• Amazon will offer free cybersecurity courses to the public and will begin providing its cloud customers with token devices for multi-factor authentication in October.
• Over the next three years, IBM will train 150,000 people in IT security and, above all, work with educational institutions that are primarily attended by blacks and other ethnic minorities.
• Together with its suppliers, Apple wants to ensure that multi-factor authentication becomes the standard among normal users, and there should also be educational offers. The group also wants to focus on optimizing the procedures for reporting and correcting security gaps.